A Few Words About the Stingray Photobomb

Last week, a photo of what has come to be known as “the stingray photobomb” started spreading across the Web. The picture has that quality, implausibly common to viral Internet photos and rarely seen outside the genre, that makes you believe that it might be, literally, the funniest thing you have ever seen. Three girls are standing in blue tropical water, clearly on a planned excursion from a cruise ship. But while the sun smiles down and the other cruisers are wearing snorkels and bobbing around happily, the three girls are cringing in horror and disgust. Behind them, a stingray appears to have snuck up behind them and photobombed the picture with his unexpected appearance—throwing his rubbery wings around the girls’ shoulders and looking at the camera with a gormless grin. “Why hello there, ladies” he’s saying in the caption of one spinoff meme.

Although the photo launched into online fame just last week, it was taken five years ago, while the girls in the picture (Sarah Bourland, Natalie Zaysoff, and Kendall Harlan) were on a spring-break cruise in the Cayman Islands. (The smiling stingray is a fairlycommon Caribbean-cruise photo-op, and there is actually a man holding the stingray behind them.) Sarah Bourland, who is now a schoolteacher in Texas, told the Huffington Post that she and her friends had not been expecting the photographer to put the stingray on their shoulders, but they loved the resulting photo and tried unsuccessfully to get it featured on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

How could Ellen’s photo-sorting intern have missed something so clearly hilarious? Maybe it was an oversight. Or maybe the photo simply wasn’t as funny five years ago, and gained its fifteen-minutes-of-fame potential by riding the linguistic wave of the word “photobomb.” Like the stingray, “photobomb” has been around for a while, but has recently come into its own. Google Trend’s graph of the search volume for the term shows nary a bump before 2008, then a jump to a bumpy plateau from 2009 to 2011, and then a sudden spike over the last few weeks, thanks to the stingray. In August of this year, “photobomb” made it into the Oxford Dictionary Online—a sign that the word had built up enough ambient density and referential power to be defined according to the particularities of its usage, and that the term had drawn a line around a phenomenon and made it recognizable.

Five years ago, when Bourland and her friends sent the stingray photo to Ellen, it might have been a proto-photobomb, from the early days of the photobomb avant-garde, but it wouldn’t have had the resonance that it has today. In the ensuing years, there have been multipleblogsdedicated to the photobomb, celebrityphotobombs, photobombing animal forerunners, all of which have contributed to the growing familiarity of the photobomb being called by its name. When it was taken, the photo would have been a funny and unusual picture of three terrified girls and a doofy-looking stingray. Today, the photo can be labelled a photobomb, which implies a narrative of surreptitious sabotage, connects the stingray to a whole tribe of obnoxious pranksters, and makes the ray look like his smile might contain a hint of frat-boyish dissolution. We’ve come so far.